CHAPTER XLIX

A DAY IN FLORENCE

FLORENCE, _February_ 12, 1819.

This evening, in a box at the theatre, I met a man who had some favour to ask of a magistrate, aged fifty. His first question was: "Who is his mistress? _Chi avvicina adesso?_" Here everyone's affairs are absolutely public; they have their own laws; there is an approved manner of acting, which is based on justice without any conventionality--if you act otherwise, you are a _porco_.

"What's the news?" one of my friends asked yesterday, on his arrival from Volterra. After a word of vehement lamentation about Napoleon and the English, someone adds, in a tone of the liveliest interest: "La Vitteleschi has changed her lover: poor Gherardesca is in despair."--"Whom has she taken?"--"Montegalli, the good-looking officer with a moustache, who had Princess Colonna; there he is down in the stalls, nailed to her box; he's there the whole evening, because her husband won't have him in the house, and there near the door you can see poor Gherardesca, walking about so sadly and counting afar the glances, which his faithless mistress throws his successor. He's very changed and in the depths of despair; it's quite useless for his friends to try to send him to Paris or London. He is ready to die, he says, at the very idea of leaving Florence."

Every year there are twenty such cases of despair in high circles; some of them I have seen last three or four

[Pg 191] years. These poor devils are without any shame and take the whole world into their confidence. For the rest, there's little society here, and besides, when one's in love, one hardly mixes with it. It must not be thought that great passions and great hearts are at all common, even in Italy; only, in Italy, hearts which are more inflamed and less stunted by the thousand little cares of our vanity, find delicious pleasures even in the subaltern species of love. In Italy I have seen love from caprice, for example, cause transports and moments of madness, such as the most violent passion has never brought with it under the meridian of Paris.[1]

I noticed this evening that there are proper names in Italian for a million particular circumstances in love, which, in French, would need endless paraphrases; for example, the action of turning sharply away, when from the floor of the house you are quizzing a woman you are in love with, and the husband or a servant come towards the front of her box.

The following are the principal traits in the character of this people:--

1. The attention, habitually at the service of deep passions, cannot move rapidly. This is the most marked difference between a Frenchman and an Italian. You have only to see an Italian get into a diligence or make a payment, to understand "la furia francese." It's for this reason that the most vulgar Frenchman, provided that he is not a witty fool, like Démasure, always seems a superior being to an Italian woman. (The lover of Princess D---- at Rome.)

2. Everyone is in love, and not under cover, as in France; the husband is the best friend of the lover.

3. No one reads.

4. There is no society. A man does not reckon, in

[Pg 192] order to fill up and occupy his life, on the happiness which he derives from two hours' conversation and the play of vanity in this or that house. The word _causerie_ cannot be translated into Italian. People speak when they have something to say, to forward a passion, but they rarely talk just in order to talk on any given subject.

5. Ridicule does not exist in Italy.

In France, both of us are trying to imitate the same model, and I am a competent judge of the way in which you copy it.[2] In Italy I cannot say whether the peculiar action, which I see this man perform, does not give pleasure to the performer and might not, perhaps, give pleasure to me.

What is affectation of language or manner at Rome, is good form or unintelligible at Florence, which is only fifty leagues away. The same French is spoken at Lyons as at Nantes. Venetian, Neapolitan Genoese, Piedmontese are almost entirely different languages, and only spoken by people who are agreed never to print except in a common language, namely that spoken at Rome. Nothing is so absurd as a comedy, with the scene laid at Milan and the characters speaking Roman. It is only by music that the Italian language, which is far more fit to be sung than spoken, will hold its own against the clearness of French, which threatens it.

In Italy, fear of the "pacha"(29) and his spies causes the useful to be held in esteem; the fool's honour simply doesn't exist.[3] Its place is taken by a kind of petty hatred of society, called "petegolismo." Finally, to make fun of a person is to make a mortal enemy, a very dangerous thing in a country where the power and activity of governments is limited to exacting taxes and punishing everything above the common level.

[Pg 193] 6. The patriotism of the antechamber.

That pride which leads a man to seek the esteem of his fellow-citizens and to make himself one of them, but which in Italy was cut off, about the year 1550, from any noble enterprise by the jealous despotism of the small Italian princes, has given birth to a barbarous product, to a sort of Caliban, to a monster full of fury and sottishness, the patriotism of the antechamber, as M. Turgot called it, _à propos_ of the siege of Calais (the _Soldat laboureur_(40) of those times.) I have seen this monster blunt the sharpest spirits. For example, a stranger will make himself unpopular, even with pretty women, if he thinks fit to find anything wrong with the painter or poet of the town; he will be soon told, and that very seriously, that he ought not to come among people to laugh at them, and they will quote to him on this topic a saying of Lewis XIV about Versailles.

At Florence people say: "our Benvenuti," as at Brescia--"our Arrici": they put on the word "our" a certain emphasis, restrained yet very comical, not unlike the _Miroir_ talking with unction about national music and of M. Monsigny, the musician of Europe.

In order not to laugh in the face of these fine patriots one must remember that, owing to the dissensions of the Middle Age, envenomed by the vile policy of the Popes,[4] each city has a mortal hatred for its neighbour, and the name of the inhabitants in the one always stands in the other as a synonym for some gross fault. The Popes have succeeded in making this beautiful land into the kingdom of hate.

This patriotism of the antechamber is the greatest moral sore in Italy, a corrupting germ that will still show its disastrous effects long after Italy has thrown off the yoke of its ridiculous little priests.[5] The form of this patriotism is an inexorable hatred for everything foreign.

[Pg 194] Thus they look on the Germans as fools, and get angry when someone says: "What has Italy in the eighteenth century produced the equal of Catherine II or Frederick the Great? Where have you an English garden comparable to the smallest German garden, you who, with your climate, have a real need of shade?"

7. Unlike the English or French, the Italians have no political prejudices; they all know by heart the line of La Fontaine:--

Notre ennemi c'est notre M.[6]

Aristocracy, supported by the priest and a biblical state of society, is a worn-out illusion which only makes them smile. In return, an Italian needs a stay of three months in France to realise that a draper may be a conservative.

8. As a last trait of character I would mention intolerance in discussion, and anger as soon as they do not find an argument ready to hand, to throw out against that of their adversary. At that point they visibly turn pale. It is one form of their extreme sensibility, but it is not one of its most amiable forms: consequently it is one of those that I am most willing to admit as proof of the existence of sensibility.

I wanted to see love without end, and, after considerable difficulty, I succeeded in being introduced this evening to Chevalier C---- and his mistress, with whom he has lived for fifty-four years. I left the box of these charming old people, my heart melted; there I saw the art of being happy, an art ignored by so many young people.

Two months ago I saw Monsignor R----, by whom I was well received, because I brought him some copies of the _Minerve_. He was at his country house with Madame D----, whom he is still pleased, after thirty-four years, "_avvicinare_," as they say. She is still beautiful, but there is a touch of melancholy in this household. People

[Pg 195] attribute it to the loss of a son, who was poisoned long ago by her husband.

Here, to be in love does not mean, as at Paris, to see one's mistress for a quarter of an hour every week, and for the rest of the time to obtain a look or a shake of the hand: the lover, the happy lover, passes four or five hours every day with the woman he loves. He talks to her about his actions at law, his English garden, his hunting parties, his prospects, etc. There is the completest, the most tender intimacy. He speaks to her with the familiar "_tu_," even in the presence of her husband and everywhere.

A young man of this country, one very ambitious as he believed, was called to a high position at Vienna (nothing less than ambassador). But he could not get used to his stay abroad. At the end of six months he said good-bye to his job, and returned to be happy in his mistress's box at the opera.

Such continual intercourse would be inconvenient in France, where one must display a certain degree of affectation, and where your mistress can quite well say to you: "Monsieur So-and-so, you're glum this evening; you don't say a word." In Italy it is only a matter of telling the woman you love everything that passes through your head--you must actually think aloud. There is a certain nervous state which results from intimacy; freedom provokes freedom, and is only to be got in this way. But there is one great inconvenience; you find that love in this way paralyses all your tastes and renders all the other occupations of your life insipid. Such love is the best substitute for passion.

Our friends at Paris, who are still at the stage of trying to conceive that it's possible to be a Persian(71), not knowing what to say, will cry out that such manners are indecent. To begin with, I am only an historian; and secondly, I reserve to myself the right to show one day, by dint of solid reasoning, that as regards

[Pg 196] manners and fundamentally, Paris is not superior to Bologna. Quite unconsciously these poor people are still repeating their twopence-halfpenny catechism.

12 _July_, 1821. There is nothing odious in the society of Bologna. At Paris the role of a deceived husband is execrable; here (at Bologna) it is nothing--there are no deceived husbands. Manners are the same, it is only hate that is missing; the recognised lover is always the husband's friend, and this friendship, which has been cemented by reciprocal services, quite often survives other interests. Most love-affairs last five or six years, many for ever. People part at last, when they no longer find it sweet to tell each other everything, and when the first month of the rupture is over, there is no bitterness.

_January_, 1822. The ancient mode of the _cavaliere servente_, imported into Italy by Philip II, along with Spanish pride and manners, has entirely fallen into disuse in the large towns. I know of only one exception, and that's Calabria, where the eldest brother always takes orders, marries his younger brother, sets up in the service of his sister-in-law and becomes at the same time her lover.

Napoleon banished libertinism from upper Italy, and even from here (Naples).

The morals of the present generation of pretty women shame their mothers; they are more favourable to passion-love, but physical love has lost a great deal.[7]

[1] Of that Paris which has given the world Voltaire, Molière and so many men of distinguished wit--but one can't have everything, and it would show little wit to be annoyed at it.

[2] This French habit, growing weaker every day, will increase the distance between us and Molière's heroes.

[3] Every infraction of this honour is a subject of ridicule in bourgeois circles in France. (See M. Picard's _Petite Ville_.)

[4] See the excellent and curious _Histoire de l'Église_, by M. de Potter.

[5] 1822.

[6] [Our enemy is our Master.--_Fables_, VI, 8.--Tr.]

[7] Towards 1780 the maxim ran:

Molti averne, Un goderne, E cambiar spesso

Travels of Shylock [Sherlock?--Tr.].

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